When the GOP surrendered in the war on porn

Tim Alberta has a lengthy piece at Politico this week dealing with the history of the Republican Party’s war on pornography (and the decline of morality in America) which will probably serve as a sad walk down memory lane for those who recall the ascendant days of the Moral Majority. When did the fight begin? The author points to Jerry Falwell railing against an interview President Jimmy Carter did for Playboy back in 1976. The preacher was outraged and soon became a powerful figure in conservative politics fighting against what he viewed as a nation in moral decline and spiritual crisis. Many Republicans flocked to his banner.

Fast forward forty years and his son, Jerry Falwell Jr., is endorsing Donald Trump for President. After giving an impassioned speech in support of Trump, he tweets out the following picture. See if you can notice what’s amiss here.

Yes, if you look closely, you’ll see that they’re posing for the shot in Trump Tower and on the future President’s wall is a cover of Playboy featuring Trump and a scantily clad Playboy model. My how the times have changed, eh?

Alberta goes on to note that pornography is a booming business in the United States, with five of the top 50 websites by traffic being pornographic in nature. And people can become addicted to pornography with disastrous results for some. But at the same time, the “war on porn” inside the GOP is basically over.

[T]he battlefield has been deserted. When a group of conservatives met last year with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, they hoped to convince him of the need for a return to rigorous Reagan-era prosecution of obscenity. Sessions, a staunch social conservative and longtime Sunday school teacher, shook his head. “There’s not enough resources to combat child pornography,” Sessions said, according to attendees, “much less to enforce obscenity laws.”

With the internet offering an ever-expanding breadth of content, and smartphones and laptops replacing squalid movie houses and black-curtained storefronts, resistance to porn is beginning to feel futile.

“Is this a winnable war? I don’t know,” says Donna Rice Hughes, a longtime anti-porn activist whose organization, Enough Is Enough, encourages a safer internet for kids. “In these cultural battles, the oxygen gets sucked out of the room after so many losses. Today, you’ve got extreme porn as the new normal—not just for adults, but for our kids. So it’s a demoralization due to so many losses and so much collateral damage.”

This is one subject where I’ve never really participated in the debate. I’ve always assumed that porn was generally harmless as long as it’s confined to the privacy of the consumer’s home and precautions are taken to steer children away from it. But having learned more in recent years, even I have to admit that there’s a problem. People with addictive personalities reportedly cite the availability of pornography as part of the path they followed before causing damage in the real world through pedophilia, violence against women and other extreme acts. You may recall that Danish submarine guy who had a lot of extreme porn on his computer before acting out his own snuff film on his private submarine.

But is this a battle that the GOP can or should wage in the modern era? It’s such a touchy subject that I almost dread bringing up the question. Even if you 100% subscribe to the notion that the government should be regulating what sort of entertainment you consume along those lines (bringing up all sorts of free speech issues, not to mention Big Brother problems), is it a winnable fight? The courts have sided with purveyors of adult content up and down the line. Preaching modesty to the masses seems like a lost cause. And, as I said, that’s only if you truly believe this is the proper role of government.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a few thoughts and point you to Alberta’s column. It’s definitely worth a read and I think you’ll find it thought-provoking.

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